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Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

Cool, but I kind of wonder if D&D has grown close enough as it is to being a board game.

For people who want to emphasize storytelling and role-playing, I recommend checking out Burning Wheel:

http://www.burningwheel.org/?page_id=2

That's not to say you can't do good collaborative storytelling etc. in d20, but Burning Wheel has explicit structures & rewards for doing so.

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There are different styles of play. I have been in games that essentially were board games with a visit to shops in between the exploration and combat. I have also been in games that barely touched the dice at all and combat was handled by DM fiat after the players laid out their strategy in very broad terms. Both types can be fun, depending on your personality/mood at the moment.

The Storyteller System used by White Wolf for the old World Of Darkness series struck me as a very good balance between the two, back before children and grad school essentially put an end to my playing.

You say "grown" but D&D originally pretty much was a board game primarily. It was only with the later AD&D that things started getting further away from the classic dungeon laid out on a table using miniatures style play and more towards what most old school RPG players might think of when they hear the term "role playing game". And by "RPG" I'm referring in this case to the non-electronic versions played out of books, such as AD&D, any of the Palladium RPGs (Rifts was my favourite) or the original Champions for examples.

For gamers who are interested in the burning wheel aesthetic but are intimidated by the crunch of the system, I would suggest starting off with the Mouse Guard RPG ( http://archaia.com/blog/titles/mouse-guard-rpg ). It's not a 'lite' system, but it is a boiled down variation on the BWRPG

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